International and national data continue to identify poor literacy standards among secondary school students. The researchers, in collaboration with a metropolitan secondary school in Perth, Western Australia, elected to use the Direct Instruction Reading Mastery program to improve students' reading skills. Data on reading performance was…

Reading comprehension is a fundamental and indispensable skill for academic achievement and daily functioning. Sadly, a significant number of children and youth, particularly those diagnosed with learning disabilities (LD), encounter difficulties in acquiring this vital capability. Thankfully, several well-established approaches exist to offer…

This study posits that there are divergent positions among scholars regarding the roles of experiential and linguistic factors in reading incompetence among Second Language (L2) readers. This study was conducted with a view to determining the exact sources of reading errors among selected second language learners. The goal was to suggest…

University educators have observed the concurrent problems of student attrition, higher than normal or desired failure rates and students struggling to complete assessable and non-assessable work, for instance, set readings. Recent public commentary has pointed to the widening participation agenda with its lowering of university entrance scores…

Reading is typically considered a survival skill in our technology- and literacy-bound culture. Individuals who struggle with learning to read are at significantly elevated risk for a number of negative outcomes, including school failure, under- and unemployment, and special education placement. Thus, those who do not learn to read fluently will…

The current article examines what factors explained the success of a reading program delivered by older adult volunteers to at-risk early readers. The article also examines the direction of the relationship over time (both direct and mediated) between reading achievement, frequency of reading at home, and academic self-beliefs. Two hundred and…

The context of this paper is studies worldwide on influence of phonological factors in language development of children. Such studies reveal the significance of Phonological Awareness in development language skills: including, predictive value of phonological short-term memory for reading skills in Grade 1. This paper throws light on factors in…

The goal of this study was to adapt scientifically-based measures for use in identifying Arabic-speaking children at risk for reading difficulties in the early primary grades. One hundred-fifty Arabic-speaking Palestinian children, living in diverse demographic areas within the West Bank, were tested at the beginning of second grade on an Arabic…

This paper explores the key findings of a range of research on teenagers and reading, focusing on the implications for classroom practice and student engagement. There is a particular emphasis on addressing the needs of underachieving and reluctant readers and the ways in which promoting reading for pleasure and enjoyment can contribute to student…

The current study analyzed existing data, collected under a previous U.S. Department of Education Reading First grant, to investigate the strength of the relationship between scores on the first- through third-grade Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills-Oral Reading Fluency (DIBELS-ORF) test and scores on a reading comprehension test…

Current policy, media and curriculum initiatives across western nations are drawing literacy and literacy pedagogy toward enticingly simplistic understandings of literacy as commodity. Increasingly they focus on "fixing" perceived literacy problems by assuming the primacy of early years literacy and "top-up" intervention…

Reading Recovery is an intensive literacy programme designed for young students who have been identified as being at-risk of reading failure after 1 year of schooling. The intervention was developed and trialled in New Zealand over 20 years ago and is now implemented in a number of education systems. The focus of this article is on recent research…

Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers were examined in a three-year longitudinal study that began at school entry. The discrepancy-defined (dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) were identified in terms of poor reading comprehension and average or above average listening comprehension…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…

Most children who do not learn to read during the primary grades will probably never learn to read well. Children who reach the end of third grade with low literacy skills typically have less access to the regular curriculum, require long-term support, and fall further behind their peers in literacy achievement and curricular knowledge. However,…